Petroleum refiners are currently faced with a need to transport and process very high molecular weight, heavy often hydrogen deficient feedstocks. Examples of these are bitumens, syncrudes from tar sands, etc. Such materials are often highly viscous, tarry, and have high pour points; in fact, some of these are actually solid. Thus transportation of these materials are recovered, particularly pipelining, is difficult, if not impossible, particularly in cold climates.
Very limited methods are available to transport and process really heavy, very high pour point, viscous petroleum type materials. Solvent deasphalting, visbreaking, pyrolysis, etc. have been proposed as means of initiating the downstream processing of these materials, but these procedures are costly, and may result in the degradation of substantial amounts of hydrocarbon to products of low value, or still not product materials of sufficient fluidity to flow well in pipelines.
The present invention is concerned with rectifying many of the prior art problems for processing heavy stocks as herein defined.